Saturday, March 30th, 2013

A weekend post? The last time that happened, Sarah Palin was reading crib notes from her own hand. Unlike that absurdity, today’s post is actually just a bit of housekeeping. With recent talk of leaving RSS, I thought I’d mention that One Foot Tsunami offers two other ways to be alerted to new posts:

Twitter: If you’re on Twitter, you can follow @OneFootTsunami, an automated bot which posts the title and a link to each day’s post.

Facebook: You can also Like One Foot Tsunami on Facebook, and a link to each post will show up in your news feed.

Why Not RSS?

I still use RSS daily, as do millions of others. However, the pending closure of Google’s Reader product means some readers might suddenly stop seeing updates from their favorite sites. Thousands of people read OFT each day via the RSS feed, so this closure could impact you as a user of Google Reader itself or another RSS app which used Reader for syncing. If you’re affected, know that there are plenty of other great RSS readers out there; RSS will survive the death of Google Reader.

Suggested RSS Readers

I’ve used NetNewsWire for over a decade, and it remains a great app which its owners will be updating soon. If you read RSS on just a single Mac or iOS device, NetNewsWire is a fine choice. Unfortunately, work on version 4 (with updated syncing across devices) has been delayed by widely-noted issues with iCloud. I’m confident the syncing issues will be handled, and eager to see the newest version.

In the meantime, to keep my feeds in sync across multiple devices, I’ve switched to a web-based reader called NewsBlur. NewsBlur offers much of what Google Reader did, including the social aspects, and I’ve already found it to be well worth a mere $2 a month. I recommend it highly1, particularly if you’re looking to replicate the Google Reader experience. Be sure to check out the iOS and Android apps, as well as the freshest version over on the NewsBlur dev site.

Thanks For Reading

Whether you follow One Foot Tsunami using RSS, the Twitter bot, through its Facebook page, or even via a simple bookmark, I want to thank you for reading.